The Rev. John Wesley, M.A., preacher, author, teacher and reformer, whose name is treasured in the hearts of believers ever since the Great Revival, would be a competent judge as to whether the miraculous gifts should be in the church today.
This is what he says:
"It does not appear that these extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were common in the church for more than two or three centuries. We seldom hear of them after that fatal period when the Emperor Constantine called himself a Christian, and from a vain imagination of promoting the Christian cause, thereby heaped riches and power and honour upon the Christians in general, but in particular upon Christian clergy.
From this time, they almost totally ceased; very few instances of the kind being found. The cause of this was not, as has been vulgarly supposed, because there is no more occasion for them because all the world were become Christian. This is a miserable mistake, not a twentieth part of it was then nominally Christian.
The real cause was: the love of many, almost all Christians, so-called, was waxed cold. The Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathen; the Son of Man when He came to examine His Church could hardly find faith. This was the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were no longer to be found in the Christian Church; because the Christians were turned heathen again, and had only a dead form left ...
The grand reason why the miraculous gifts were so soon withdrawn was not that faith and holiness were well nigh lost, but that dry, formal, orthodox men began even then to ridicule whatever gifts they had not themselves, and to decry them all as either madness or impostures."
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